


Rewritten (Living History)

by writerdragonfly



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Angst with a Happy Ending, Anxiety & Related Mental Health Issues, F/F, F/M, Heavy Angst, Linguistic Drift, M/M, Modern Character in Thedas, Modern Girl in Thedas, Modern Thedas World Building, Partial Deafness, Potential Cullen/Inquisitor, The weight of choices, Time Travel, Time Travel Fix-It, paradoxes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-22
Updated: 2020-06-22
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:01:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24853495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writerdragonfly/pseuds/writerdragonfly
Summary: When a newly discovered artifact is delivered to her office, Seraphine finds herself capitulated into the past. Taking the place of the original Inquisitor is a terrible accident, but something she cannot change. Keeping the timeline as close as possible is her goal, but with only limited knowledge of the events of the Dragon Age and the realization that with time, many truths are washed away, her goal seems nearly impossible. Still, she has to try, or risk that the very future she once lived would cease to exist.
Relationships: Female Inquisitor & Advisors, Female Inquisitor & Companions, Female Inquisitor & Dorian Pavus, Iron Bull/Dorian Pavus
Comments: 4
Kudos: 18





	Rewritten (Living History)

**Author's Note:**

> Potentially inaccurate depictions of tinnitus and linguistic drift. But! Attempts were made. I welcome reader input.
> 
> Updates may be slow, but I've been working on this for a couple of years now. If I don't start posting, I never will. 
> 
> I didn't want to tag too much (and I may have already), so if you have any pairings or anything you'd rather not see please let me know in the comments so I can let you know if it would appear at all. 
> 
> The entire cast of companions will appear, but I had too many characters tagged already. 
> 
> Please enjoy~!

* * *

#  -one-

* * *

  
  


_ the fade _ _  
_ _ day 0 _

Seraphine wakes slowly, her tinnitus ringing in her ears. The world tastes of ash and metal, coppery blood pooling in her mouth and dripping down her face. 

For a long moment, she cannot see. Her eyes adjust in stuttering stages, shades of green and black spilling across as far as she can see. 

A shape, a light, a woman—reaching her hand out. A flicker of orange.

And then, again, nothing. 

Darkness. 

  
  
  


* * *

_ thedas _

_ unknown location _

_ day 0 _

  
  


Her ears are still ringing when she wakes again, nothing but indecipherable muffled sound around her. Voices, she thinks. Angry voices. But she cannot understand the words. 

Her vision slowly adjusts to the low lighting, scattered light by torch hardly illuminating the room. She tries to cover her ears instinctively, voices louder when they realize she’s awake probably. 

The chains stop her. 

She’d been in handcuffs before. A protest on campus and a smattering of others after graduation, the one time she accidentally stabbed someone, and once in a purely sexual context. 

These are not handcuffs. 

The thick rough iron belongs in her museum, not attached to her wrists. It’s a classic style, clearly handwrought from the slightly uneven quality and well used from the way it’s worn on the inside from repeated use. 

But, then there’s a sharp sound, a green flash of light sparking to life in front of her eyes, and immediate pain screaming down her arm. Her hand feels like it was shut in a door but a thousand times worse, rippling through her nerves as if on fire. 

Then there’s a woman, crouched low in front of her. 

_ To seek a find truth.  _ The symbol on her armor is familiar to her, historical knights and swords romance novels had been her guilty pleasure for a long time. 

But there hadn’t been a Seeker in something approaching a thousand years. They were history, a romantic trope for middle-aged women. 

Was she stuck in someone’s sick idea of a live-action role play?

She tries to focus but the sound and lack of light make her headache worse. 

And then she’s out again, to the silence. 

* * *

_ thedas _

_ unknown location _

_ day 1 _

  
  


She doesn’t know how long she’s out this time, but she wakes to a cold, wet cloth sliding across her face. It’s a relief, a balm to a still aching head, and smells faintly floral.

There’s no longer ringing, the tinnitus apparently shuffling down to a low-grade buzz she knows will last days if she stays away from loud noises and will quickly rise back if she doesn’t. 

Still, she can’t quite understand the woman caring for her. The words feel just the wrong side of foreign. Close but not close enough for her to recognize. Maybe if the buzzing had stopped, she could concentrate enough on the edge of familiar, but it’s still too loud in her head. 

The woman in front of her is pretty, strands of lovely red hair falling from her hood. It is, perhaps, the wrong aspect to focus on, her looks. But, her arm and hand ache worse than anything she’s ever felt, and well... she isn’t sure she wants to look down to find out why. 

She does anyway, immediately noticing the distinct lack of black metal. It’s replaced by a thick twisted rope tied around her wrists, some kind of thin discolored bandage separating it from directly rubbing her skin. She looks back up at the fuzzy sound of voices before she can examine herself any closer.

“I can’t understand what you’re saying,” she says, her voice rough and her own words somewhat muffled to her own ears, “I can’t hear you.”

She tries to read the woman’s lips, but the woman looks away from her too quickly to decipher. 

“ _ —sawndrah.”  _ It’s the first clear thing she’s heard, and she thinks it’s a name. She follows the redhead’s gaze back to the woman behind her, the woman wearing the Seeker symbol. 

Is this Sawndrah?

The rest of the words either woman says are lost as a sharp whistling sound accompanied by the green flash of light and subsequent resurgence of pain in her hand and arm drown out everything else. She bites her tongue in an effort not to scream, fresh blood speckling on her lips. 

The spike of agony is just beginning to lessen to a steady ache when the women pull her up with tight fingers around the bare skin of her forearms, leaving faint red marks from the pressure. Her legs disagree with the sudden movement, and she struggles to steady herself without the use of her hands. 

Sawndrah continues to speak, but she cannot filter any of the words without carefully examining the woman’s mouth. A feat made impossible by the way she is dragged behind the woman who continues to speak, leaving her prison cell and down a dimly lit hall to crumbling stone stairs. The redhead stays behind, watching them in silence.

Her entire body aches, her mouth tastes of blood, her skull feels as if someone had used her head as a drum set during a heavy metal concert, and she twists her bad ankle trying to climb the stairs with lingering vertigo. 

It is a bad day; she doesn’t know where she is, she cannot communicate, she is in pain, and fears whatever brought her to this moment. And then Sawndrah brings her outside, and the world is awash in eerie green light and a torn sky.

Seraphine doesn’t understand. She turns to stare at Sawndrah in dawning horror. 

“--call ... ... Breach. It’s ... ... rift into the ... ... demons that ... larger with ... passing hour. ... not the ... ... ..., just the largest. All ... caused by the explosion ... ... conclave.”

_ Breach. Rift. Explosion. Conclave. _

She finds herself at a loss for words. Between the broken sky and the words that she was able to decipher... She knows that technology and magitek have developed in leaps and bounds, seen the fruits of their labor from movies and concerts. She also knows--deeply, inherently--this isn’t that. 

The world tastes of petrichor and lightning and blood and ash.

“This can’t be real,” she sobs, spinning around as fast as her battered body can manage, trying desperately to catalog every inch of a fractured world, “this isn’t happening.”

Because Seraphine Alexander was a child of the Bright Age and the Breach was a piece of long-ago history, back in the Dragon Age some twelve hundred years prior.

_ This isn’t happening. _

Except that it was.

* * *

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> Please feel free to comment~! I welcome the conversation.
> 
> Hit me up anywhere to harangue me into writing, talk fic, fandom, or whatever catches your fancy.  
> [Tumblr: writerdragonfly](https://writerdragonfly.tumblr.com)  
> Discord: writerdragonfly#5403  
> [Twitter: writerdragonfly ](https://twitter.com/writerdragonfly)  
> PSN & Steam: writerdragonfly


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